The ending balance that will not tie

Four ranges, one equation

Per fund, the check is arithmetic. Beginning fund balance lives in objects 9791, 9793, and 9795 (plus audit and restatement adjustments). Revenues and other financing sources are the 8000s. Expenditures and other uses are 1000 through 7999. The reported ending fund balance components sit in 9700 through 9790: nonspendable, restricted, committed, assigned, and unassigned pieces that must sum to what the flows imply.

If beginning plus revenues minus expenditures does not equal the components, the file is internally inconsistent, and the review will say so before certification does.

The four usual homes of the difference

• A component left stale. Flows were updated late (a final accrual, an audit adjustment) and the 9700-series components were not restated to match.
• One side of an entry. A revenue or expenditure posted whose balancing side never made it into the same fund's dataset.
• A component in the wrong bucket. The pieces are individually plausible but were built from an older trial balance, so the total drifts by exactly the late entries.
• Beginning balance out of sync. The 9791 in this year's file does not match where last year actually ended.

Close it where it belongs

The mechanical fix adjusts a component, most often unassigned (9790) in the unrestricted resource, so the pieces sum to what the flows compute. The honest fix first asks why the difference exists, because a component adjustment that papers over a missing accrual fixes the check and keeps the error.

Run the identity per fund, not just on the general fund. The difference you find in Fund 13 or Fund 21 in August is a footnote; the same difference found at export time is a cycle.